Since the New Deal, Republicans have been on the wrong side of every issue of concern
to ordinary Americans; Social Security, the war in Vietnam, equal rights,
civil liberties, church- state separation, consumer issues, public education, reproductive
freedom, national health care, labor issues, gun policy, campaign-finance
reform, the environment
and tax fairness. No political party could
remain so consistently wrong by accident.
The only rational conclusion is
that, despite their cynical "family values" propaganda, the Republican Party
is a criminal conspiracy to betray the interests of the American people
in
favor of plutocratic and corporate interests, and absolutist religious groups.

Brainwashed Rubes Now In
Control of the Republican PartyThe Republican "Base"

Back in the day of the so-called Gingrich Revolution the Republican Party began
pandering to Christian fundamentalists by offering sops on abortion and other religious
issues. It was then that Republicans abandoned policy in favor of
propaganda -- becoming completely irrelevant to actual governance and instead
concentrating solely on their own political survival.
Ironically, their
propaganda has been too successful. A generation of pervasive and increasingly
deceptive right-wing propaganda has made the Republican base, i.e., the Tea Party,
so simultaneously disinformed (due to their self-restriction to right-wing
propaganda sources) and so radically absolutist as to become politically incoherent.
Faced with the prospect of defending the indefensible, the Republican Party
has instead pursued their only possible strategy for victory: Democratic voter
suppression and election theft.

The Big Republican Lie About Taxes and Spending
Jack HughesIf Republicans want to run the government like a business, why do they keep "selling"
below "cost"?
Republicans often say that government should be run like a business. If we
use that business analogy, let us consider that the government's "products" are
the services it provides: defense, Social Security, Medicare, law enforcement,
food and transportation safety, environmental protection, medical and scientific
research, etc. The "price" government charges for these "products" is the taxes
it collects.

Using the business analogy, let's say the business
of America was humming along nicely in 2000 -- "turning a profit," i.e., running
a surplus. But the Republican economic philosophy is that "customers like low
prices therefore cutting prices is good," and after the inauguration of President
George W. Bush, Republicans lowered the price for government products -- by
cutting taxes -- at an arbitrarily low rate below "operating costs." Imagine how
this approach would affect a business in the real world. Bankruptcy would result
-- and quickly.

Republicans understood that the resulting deficits
were unsustainable. The costs for the products exceeded the prices they were
charging to deliver them to consumers. But after arbitrarily cutting the price
and recognizing that they were now generating deficits, these Republican "businessmen"
reached an odd conclusion. They convinced themselves that since "cutting
prices is good" then the only other explanation for their red ink must be higher
operating costs -- they were spending too much.

Remember, first
they were making a profit, then they cut the prices, then they started losing
money, and then blamed operating costs for their problem. The possibility that
the lower revenues from the reduced prices never occurred to them. Our Republican
"businessmen" then reached the conclusion after careful, sober, consideration
that, even after laying-off millions of workers to cut costs, they were still
spending too much. So, unfortunately, they must eliminate the product lines and
go out of business -- even though the products were selling like hotcakes. In
a real business these would be considered either grossly incompetent or suspiciously
dishonest businessmen.

Our Republican "businessmen" are so fixated
on the concept of "cutting prices" that they would rather go out of business
than raise their prices. Somehow, they convinced themselves that the price
could be whatever the customer wanted to pay, not what they needed to pay to keep
the company in business.

No business could survive if the price
it charged for its products was lower than the cost to produce them. Yet since
the Reagan years (with the exception of the Clinton administration and despite
unanimous congressional Republican opposition) that has been the official economic
policy of the US government -- resulting in an enormous national debt.

Faced with this $14 trillion dollar national debt -- generated by irresponsible "low
prices" Republican tax cuts -- the Republican solution is to cut or eliminate
vital and popular "products" like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. They
have been aided in this scheme by an incoherent and feckless Democratic Party
and a news media owned by the same plutocratic interests that control the Republican
Party.

While there are always some products offered by the US
government that are of questionable value, most of the big-ticket items are of
obvious public utility, meet a vital societal need and enjoy strong "consumer
demand" by citizens.

The Republican opposition to Big Government programs
like Social Security and Medicare is not due the national debt. The national
debt is due to the Republicans' opposition to these programs since they can
only be financed by a system of progressive taxation -- which is the real Republican
target.

Republicans know they could never attack popular programs
like Social Security and Medicare directly -- it would be political suicide.
So for a generation Republicans have utilized a strategy known as "starving
the beast," which means depriving the government of revenue through tax cuts.

Scams
like the so-called Ryan Plan, which destroys Medicare and will
cut, if not eliminate, already stingy Social Security benefits are just the inevitable
endgame of the "starve the beast" strategy. After decades of deliberately
engineered budget deficits through insufficient taxation, Republicans now point
to vital programs like Social Security and Medicare and say "Unfortunately,
we just can't afford it."

But what is never mentioned in this debate
about costs and spending and the debt is that we could afford it, if we just
raised taxes -- especially on wealth.

We started in 2000 with annual
surpluses with the Clinton tax rates, then enacted the Bush tax cuts, immediately
started racking-up huge deficits, and the Republicans now try to convince
us the problem is one of "over spending." Republicans could apply that economic
theory to unemployment and reassure the jobless that they are just "over-spending."

The
manufactured confusion over the cause of the federal deficit
would be more credible if the entirely predictable result had not been foreseen
as early as the 2000 presidential debates, when Al Gore rightly criticized
George W. Bush's irresponsible tax-cut scheme when he first proposed it.

Why
would Americans fall for such a scam? How could such an assault on middle-class
interests and prosperity be so brazenly and openly perpetrated? Surely
Americans are not fools or amnesiacs and remember why these government programs
were necessary in the first place. Will middle-class America passively acquiesce
as their country is looted in order to further enrich the already wealthy?

Unfortunately,
Republicans do run government like a business in that
they sell this steaming turd like modern American corporations do -- with slick
propaganda and deceptive advertising on TV. Just as they lie that deficits are
caused by "over-spending" instead of "tax cuts," Republicans now utilize rigid
message discipline and clever distortion -- mixed with shameless lies -- more
resembling a psychological warfare operation than traditional political campaigns.

Like
our hypothetical Republican "businessmen," Republicans in
Congress and in state governments they control have embarked on a radical program
of governmental disestablishment through tax cuts and the resulting de-funding
of necessary government functions. State governments across the country are
staging "going out of business" sales and liquidating state assets to private
corporations at bargain prices.

When democratically elected, accountable
governmental power is disestablished, unaccountable corporate power will fill
the void. That's what Republican blather about "over spending" really means.